3 Big Tech Stocks on Traders' Radars - views

BALTIMORE (Stockpickr) -- Put down the 10-K filings and the stock screeners. It's time to take a break from the traditional methods of generating investment ideas. Instead, let the crowd do it for you.

From hedge funds to individual investors, scores of market participants are turning to social media to figure out which stocks are worth watching. It's a concept that's known as "crowdsourcing," and it uses the masses to identify emerging trends in the market.

Crowdsourcing has long been a popular tool for the advertising industry, but it also makes a lot of sense as an investment tool. After all, the market is completely driven by the supply and demand, so it can be valuable to see what names are trending among the crowd.

While some fund managers are already trying to leverage social media resources like Twitter to find algorithmic trading opportunities, for most investors, crowdsourcing works best as a starting point for investors who want a starting point in their analysis. Today, we'll leverage the power of the crowd to take a look at some of the most active stocks on the market today.

These "most active" names are the most heavily-traded names on the market -- and often, uber-active names have some sort of a technical or fundamental catalyst driving investors' attention on shares. That's especially true now that earnings season is officially underway. And when there's a big catalyst, there's often a trading opportunity.

It's a rare double-digit day for Groupon (GRPN) today -- at least as of this writing -- following an earnings beat for the first quarter of 2013. Groupon has been a perennial underperformer since its IPO in late 2011, and the 76% decline in the stock's price since going public is proof of that. But the 3 cents per share that the firm earned for the quarter bested investors' expectations, and that's all it took to spur a move higher in the stock.

It's a little too early to call today's price action the start of something. From a technical standpoint, today's 10% jump higher isn't particularly important -- shares are still sitting in between resistance at $6.50 and support down at $5.25. And with GRPN's price fading this afternoon, I wouldn't exactly recommend throwing money at this stock right now. Caveat emptor.

Micron Technology (MU) is unlike most of the high-volume names on our list today because it's not an earnings mover. Instead, this large-cap semiconductor stock is seeing huge trading activity thanks to a technical breakout in shares.

Micron has spent the last few months consolidating sideways in a rectangle pattern with resistance at $10 and support at $9. That well-formed rectangle was providing investors with a chance for the stock to bleed off some overbought momentum after rallying more than 100% since the end of November. The breakout above $10 is a buy signal at this point.

Communications company Windstream (WIN) is off 5% this afternoon, shoved lower thanks to an earnings miss. The firm earned 9 cents per share, while analysts' consensus estimate was 11 cents. That falls well short of the 25 cents that management has promised to pay investors in dividends, far from a strong sign that WIN's massive 12.3% dividend yield can remain tenable long-term.

In the nearer-term, the technicals don't look much better. Windream had been looking bullish thanks to an inverse head and shoulders pattern that's been building since back in February. But today's gap down on earnings broke the pattern before it had a chance to complete, scuttling WIN's chances of recapturing highs found at the start of this year. This stock doesn't look pretty right now.

At the time of publication, portfolios managed by author were long TSLA.

Jonas Elmerraji, CMT, is a senior market analyst at Agora Financial in Baltimore and a contributor to TheStreet. Before that, he managed a portfolio of stocks for an investment advisory returned 15% in 2008. He has been featured in Forbes , Investor's Business Daily, and on CNBC.com. Jonas holds a degree in financial economics from UMBC and the Chartered Market Technician designation.